Catching my balance.

August 2006

31 August 2006

I suppose it is inevitable when you have a birthday pass that you start
thinking about aging and getting old and all that good stuff... and
maybe start hearing your body complaining just a little louder than you
remember it doing before....

Well, I've always had whiny knees.
I've knocked them around quite a bit, most recently in a series of
motorcycle accidents, but also in cycling crashes and that slip off
that mountain a bazillion years ago. I've had a barometric super power
for decades.

But I woke up this morning with my wrists
throbbing and thought... what the hell?? And then looked at the weather
report on the internets and realized that I was feeling the impending
arrival of Ernesto (which, apparently, will be a tropical depression by
the time it gets here. Something that always sounded a bit silly to me.
I mean, a tropical depression? It's what I called that rather desperate
couple of months in Danang during the wet season when Dissertations
Number One and Two were quietly imploding: it was tropical, I was
depressed. I suppose, it being the Rainy Season When Your Clothes
Remain Damp Always And The Dirt Streets Run With Disease-Laden Flood
Waters, that there are a fair number of layered and doubles usages in
there. But I digress.). So my barometer has migrated over time.

The
achy wrist thing sucks. As I made myself coffee and grumbled to myself
about it I suddenly caught a snippet of my own complaining in my head
and thought, holy shit! I'm like one of those old people at the nursing
home who complains about their back all the time! And I suddenly also
understood why they do that-- because the pain is distracting.
It's hard to think about other things when your joints are throbbing. I
had a flashing image of that last video of Pol Pot in Anlong Veng in
that final interview before he finally died in 1997. He was an old man,
and while the interviewer kept trying to get him to talk a bit about
all the horrible things he'd done-- "Don't you feel bad about all the
people who died because of you?" (he answered with the now rather
standard genocidiere response-- oh no, I've made my peace with
[fill in blank here-- God, gods, myself, my people, my family, etc.])--
but all Le Pot wanted to talk about was his aching back.

28 August 2006

You know, you end up getting all sorts of things for your birthday over the years. At least I have. This year I got some of the best gifts I've ever gotten, and all from the same person, who managed to cover the practical, the personal, and the precious (and even the amusing-- a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean!).

My computer has been running at glacial speed for the last couple months as I'd managed to completely fill my hard drive (ah, photography, how you take up real estate). This was causing me all sorts of grief and I'd spent hours deleting things and culling my image database in an attempt to reclaim a gig of space so that I might actually be able to use the machine and not have things take days to save. On my birthday I came running home from work to change and head out to the airport to meet P, whose flight was due in at 7, and found a box left by UPS on my doorstep: two external hard drives from P, who not only sent them, but over the weekend he hooked them up and cleaned up my computer. It's like I got a whole new machine. So for my birthday I had one of my personal stresses removed-- I have all kinds of space to work and can even go back to poking through and scanning things from my film archives. And I didn't even have to pull my hair out trying (and failing, as I apparently did with the other external hard drive I'd picked up months ago) to get everything hooked up. Is this not the most awesome birthday gift?

P also brought me gorgeous prints of two of my favorite images, a gift that I absolutely love and appreciate. I prefer giving things that I've made (if I had time it would be de rigeur), and I love getting things that other people have made... and these are images that I've wished I had a print of a thousand times.

And P brought himself, arriving on the night of my birthday, which made for a medium birthday with a big happy. Going out to celebrate getting older takes on a whole different tone when someone travels across the country to do it. It all made for one of the best birthdays I can remember... and that's worth celebrating.

23 August 2006

In two hours (give or take a few minutes) I'm going to be a year older... so I guess it's appropriate that after half a year at my "new" job I finally got around to signing up for my retirement package today. Now that the whole dissertation/finishing the doctorate thing is behind me and I'm reasonably sure that there will be no second act in the academy I'm starting to come to terms with that whole period of my life, and maybe even settling with myself over the issue of having decided to embark on that path in the first place. Which is not to say that I don't think "if only I'd known....," I've just hit a point where I usually think, eh, shrug. I didn't know. So there you go.

The exceptions to this scenario are when two topics are raised: dental work and retirement. Because if you would like to have a decent set of choppers or would like not to work until you're eighty-five, then you should cross graduate school off your list with a big, black, indelible ink marker.

Graduate school was hell on my teeth. Or rather, fifteen years of not having dental insurance, eight of those in graduate school when, if I'd chosen a different path, I might have been working at a real job that had dental insurance, was hell on my teeth. I'm pretty sure that poor dental health is endemic to graduate students.

And retirement. I'm not kidding about the being eighty-five when I retire thing. Unless I hit lotto I'm looking at spending my sunset years as a greeter at Walmart. I keep thinking of those eight years I spent not working at a job with a 401K plan while I was in graduate school.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

So tomorrow I will "celebrate" a medium birthday. As I explained to my homegirl Dr. T, whom I bumped into on my way home from the gym this evening, it isn't a big birthday-- those are the ones that end in zeros. In fact, Dr. T has one of those coming up not long after mine. A medium birthday is one that ends in a five. Not a milestone, per se. More like a reflective mile marker staked in the ground at a jaunty angle. Not surprisingly, both Dr. T and I have been feeling reflective (and not in the mile marker sort of way), what with our impending medium/big birthdays. I suppose that is the way these things often go.

You know, you start thinking about the choices you've made and whether or not they are the ones you would have made knowing better, and how it has affected the options you now have. What you want out of life, what you'd like to accomplish... all the stuff of panic attacks. Are there things I wonder about? Sure. But there aren't any decisions I made, based on the information I had at the time, that I can say were bad, even when the end result was. Which isn't to say there aren't things that I worry about for the next five or ten or whatever years. But at the moment, on the eve of my birthday, I have more things that bring me joy than not, which is the best you can reasonably hope for. Besides, I know at least one gift that is arriving tomorrow that is going to make it a happy birthday, indeed.

21 August 2006

On Friday the Hal Hartley movie The Girl From Monday arrived
from Netflix. When I put it in my queue it was really just that it was
a Hal Hartley film, and that, while I find them almost uncomfortably
odd, I tend to like them anyway. The scene in Simple Men where
the father's crazy, epileptic, Eastern European girlfriend does that
wacky dance to Sonic Youth is simply priceless. I didn't bother to read
the description... that this is a Sci-Fi film by Hal Hartley.
Which is a mistake. He takes reality and twists it.... you can't start
from a twisted reality and then twist... too much twisting. It felt
like a low budget remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Which I suspect requires drugs for enjoyment. Something I also suspect of The Girl From Monday,
(and yes, I get the whole subtext, I just found it too heavy handed...
like an after school special gone horribly wrong). Instead, I let it
drone on while I spent my Saturday being boring and cleaning my
apartment and organizing my film archives and contemplating booby
trapping that burgler easy access kitchen door.

On Sunday I
went to the roller derby-- the playoffs. The season championship is
next month. Sadly, the roller rink where the bouts have been held is
being demolished by the park service, who just bought the land to build
an indoor soccer... what? Rink? Field? You know what I mean. Not that
soccer is sad... it's really one of the only sports I like to watch
(ninety minutes, people. Ninety minutes. Why are American sports
usually interminable?). But the rink reminded me of roller rinks where
I skated to ELO and celebrated other girls' birthdays. Okay, the ELO
part is less than pleasant, and I have really only the very very
vaguest recollection of the plot of Xanadu, but I did have a certain nostalgic soft spot for Putty Hill. Apparently the championship will be held at a rink in Dundalk.

In
the meantime, the Charm City Roller Girls have really honed their
skillz the last couple of months. The bouts have gotten faster and the
competition stiffer. I'm hoping to make it to the championship bout on
the 17th... but it does make me wonder if the DC Roller Girls league is
ever going to get rolling?

17 August 2006

So this morning I had a classic city livin' experience, though it was, thankfully for me at least, an experience by (very near) proxy. As I finished getting ready for work this morning I heard someone knocking on the door upstairs. I live in the basement apartment of a single family house and the front door of the main house is above my bedroom, so I could hear the knocking, followed by insistent knocking, followed by a man's voice saying, "Anybody home?" I sort of ignored it and went about my business until I heard footsteps coming down the cellar stairs followed by more knocking. Hmmm, sounds like maybe someone is knocking on my kitchen door, which leads to the main house's cellar. I got up and started walking towards the kitchen, thinking maybe it was a meter reader or something (my landlady's cleaning lady followed me frantically down the path to my apartment door the other day explaining that she'd had to let a meter reader into my apartment through the kitchen door. I think she was concerned I'd call the cops on her or something, though I probably wouldn't have even noticed), heard someone struggling with the cart (one of those bag lady type carts for grocery shopping, which I hang on the door knob), followed by a booming male voice yelling, "Police!"

Uhhhhhh......

I respond, "What?" He yells again, "Police!" I make it into the kitchen, where I find an uniformed officer leaning into my apartment through the kitchen door. He starts to say why he's there. I notice my landlady behind him waving. He turns and looks at her and then says, "Well, I'll let you explain it." And then he headed upstairs, leaving my landlady to explain that someone had broken into the main house, scrambling through a window whose screen he'd removed, located right above my living room. He's (or she'd) stolen my landlady's purse and some cash from a drawer. I guess we're all lucky that that was it (though obviously, my landlady is in the unlucky position of having been robbed)... but it kind of creeps me out to think that some random person was wandering around the rooms above my head, an unlocked (and unlockable) door away from my apartment, where I was snoozing, rock-like, from complete exhaustion (and I fear an oncoming cold).

Now my apartment is kind of burgler boobytrapped, at least aurally-- anyone trying to scramble in any of the little windows would knock potted plants all over the place; the one window that isn't a little window is behind the headboard of my bed, so, you know, if they came in that way they'd wake me up; the struggle with the shopping cart makes the kitchen entry rather loud, and I have a string of bells that someone gave me ages ago to ward off evil spirits (and perhaps thieves) hanging on my front doorknob. So chances are that I'd wake up if anyone tried to come into my apartment... but I understand that this is usually the *worst* case scenario, since finding you awake and aware of their presence sometimes prompts an intruder to (ahem) silence you.

Crikey. What's weird is that I spent years living in bad neighborhoods in Brooklyn and more than a year in Phnom Penh where everyone I knew (except me) was robbed at some point, and now that I'm living in the nicest neighborhood of my adult life there are people prowling around upstairs. And apparently I've been cutting through a park each evening that is *the* hotspot for nighttime muggings-- particularly of women walking through there alone-- for months. I can't decide if I'm getting old and paranoid, or if I just spent years being young and not paranoid enough....

13 August 2006

Looks like it's a go... Word is that there is a site. I'm off to my AOM committee meeting this morning to go check it out. So start thinking about what you'd like to put up and get your fingers warmed up for online registration. More general information, and when it's available, registration forms available here.

10 August 2006

Nashville! Okay, mostly I napped in Nashville after a string of
problems and issues at the hotel.* But I did walk around along
Broadway, where there are a string of bars and clubs and record shops,
all of them running talent shows offering the opportunity to strut your
stuff. Musicians line the street at night, playing guitars and
harmonicas and singing country songs they've written themselves. It
reminded me, oddly, of the way actors flock to, well, Broadway, in New
York.

The Ryman Auditorium
is a pretty interesting space, lined with pews, the back wall
punctuated by colored glass windows. It was a great venue for Tom
Waits-- just intimate enough. And he was incredible-- one of the best
shows I've ever seen. His movements were sporadic and sometimes
spastic, he wagged his finger at the audience and punctuated the songs
with a combination of his fingers and his feet. He interspersed the
song list with sharp, witty observations and quick responses to the
comments thrown out by the audience.

The Tom Waits oeuvre is
massive, so you can't really hope to hear your most beloved songs in 75
minute show. And he didn't do any of my absolute favorites... but he
did do two songs from my favorite album (Bone Machine)-- a very blusey
version of Murder in the Red Barn, and the amusingly snarky Goin' Out West, during which he gave signficant, eyebrow wagging looks to the audience while declaring:

I don't need no make upI got real scarsI got hair on my chestI look good without a shirt

The
only downside was that it was (supposed to be) a no
photography/recording show. Not that this prevented people from
shooting off the occasional snap, flashing the audience from the
balcony with their point and shoots (me thinking, that is so not going
to come out). Knowing this I hadn't worked terribly hard to finish off
the ISO 400 film in my cameras (I had ISO 1600 in the bag, which I'd
brought in response to the Ryman's pro-camera policy). But after
watching other people flashing away I tried to get in a couple of shots
with much too slow for the situation film. But other than that, a
stellar show-- actually worth the interminable drive.

Which
was interminable. It took twelve hours of straight driving to get back
to DC, with a whole lotta Virginia in the middle. But I did start the
morning off with coffee... making all the difference.

* The hotel had many many problems of the couldn't get their shit together nature. IT was no Snowy River, that's for sure. The one thing that they *did* do right, however, was to give you a complimentary Goo Goo Cluster
upon check in. I'd never heard of them until P introduced me them on
the trip to Montana... and daaaamn, they are yummy. If they'd doled out
a few more complimentary clusters I might have felt less crabby about
things like there not being a lightbulb in the light in the room. Of
course, if they'd doled a few more of those out I also might have OD'd
on sugar and thrown up, which conceivably would have made me more crabby.

09 August 2006

So up at (literally) the crack of dawn and stepped out into a parking lot so foggy I thought I was back in Maine. Off into the fog and on the road by 6:30 am... Nashville, hoooooo!!!

Not naturally a morning person, my priority was to find coffee. Real coffee. I refuse to recognize McDonald's "coffee" as a viable substitute. How hard can this be? I had been lulled into a sense of coffee security by the West Virginia highway authority. Every rest stop in the state before Huntington had a Starbucks. Exits before Huntington that weren't official rest stops had Dunkin Donuts. Unbeknownst to me I'd passed some invisible dividing line just before I'd stopped for the night, something I've dubbed: the caffeinental divide.

Because not only was Huntington sadly lacking in coffee, but soon after leaving the city I crossed a bridge and was in Kentucky, The Coffeeless State. No, really, I didn't find any coffee in the entire state. Instead of drinking coffee in the morning I think the fine folks of Kentucky chain smoke to perk up of a morning. At least that was the impression I got when I pulled into Midway to get some gas.*

I stepped out of the car and contemplated the notes, written in black magic marker on silver duct tape, all over the pump directly customers to go inside the little building where the cashier was to prepay while listening to the four men standing around or crawling under an ancient station wagon (it was new, perhaps, in 1973) and discussing what was wrong with it. Besides the fact that it looked as though a light nudge might prompt it to disintegrate into a pile of rust dust. (Consensus: Brake line all jacked up). There was a sign on the side of the little building that said:

Smokes

Do You Need? MilkBreadDrinksSmokes

I can say with confidence that no one inside the little building had forgotten the smokes. I opened the door and couldn't see beyond three inches in front of me for the blue haze. I contemplated whether or not one might ultimately develop cancer from having had an extremely intensive encounter with second hand smoke. Behind the counter were two women who looked to be in their late forties or early fifties, though considering the accelerated aging caused by smoking... they might be been in their early twenties for all I know. Blond hair, an inch of dark roots; patch of blue frosty eyeshadow. Having, by this point, given up on the possibility of coffee, I put a Red Bull on the counter and handed my bank card over for a tank of gas. The older of the two women runs the card through the machine and looks at the little screen. We wait. We wait. We wait. We wait some more. She looks at the other one over her glasses.

"Is that phone upstairs plugged in?"

"I don't know."

She heads off upstairs. And so starts a twenty-five minute journey through the intricacies of credit card machines in rural Kentucky. I got my gas. My gas got charged to someone else's card. They paid him cash because they didn't know how to undo it. They tried to run my card three times. I wondered if I shouldn't learn how to train horses, because it was looking like I might be there for a while. Days, months, possibly years. Eventually they gave up and had me sign a receipt of some sort. I'm almost positive I was charged at least twice. Possibly three times.

And finally, I was off. Kentucky may not have coffee, but it's awfully pretty. One of my grandmothers was from the state, but this was the first time I'd ever been there. I wish I'd had some time to actually see something-- like the town she'd been from-- but it wasn't going to happen on this trip.

Onward to the Guitar City!

* It's one of these five. I dunno which one. But as an aside can I ask why there is more than one Midway in the state? I wondered whether or not this was some sort of Kentucky thing and discovered that it isn't-- Texas, for example... Oklahoma... North Carolina... I started wondering if it was just me, since it seems to be the norm to have a bunch of them. But then I realized that I'm from a state that wasn't tempted to use the name once, nevermind more than once.

08 August 2006

Tom Waits is
finishing up a rare tour, and after being a fan for fifteen years,
waiting for the chance to see him live, I wasn't going to be put off by
the fact that he wasn't playing in DC. Or Maryland. Or New York or
Philidelphia or Virginia... or that the closest dates on the tour were
in Ashville, NC (on a Wednesday) and Nashville, TN (on a Saturday).
Nashville, hooooooo!!!!

The flights were ridiculously expensive,
so... well.... I'll just rent a car and drive! This seemed like a good
idea mostly because a) I don't have a car and rarely drive; b) I've
never driven to/through Tennessee and had no realistic idea of how long
it would take to get there. Not only that, but even the lying mapquest
calculations of how long it would take to get there didn't give a
realistic view of the passage of time when one has to drive through
Virginia, The Traffic Jam State. Two and a half hours from Union Station to Manassas.33.6 miles.

Sitting
in traffic one can contemplate one's traffic companions. Lots of "My
child is a X school honor student" bumper stickers. One woman, the back
of whose car I had a good twenty minutes to contemplate, had one of
those pentagon/american flag/9-11 VA license plates (Virginia has more
license plate designs than any state I've ever encountered), two
American flag stickers (and a mini flag hanging off the rearview), a "W
the president" bumper sticker (as opposed to... W the letter?).... and
a Human Rights Campaign bumper
sticker. I had a long time to consider the mixed messages of her
vehicle. Is she really that conflicted? Does she not realize that one
of these things doesn't belong here? Or was the application of the HRC
some sort of vandalism by someone else?

After hours and hours
and hours of driving, hungry and somewhere in way western Virginia,
stopped to get something to eat. With very few options, on to
Wendy's.... the worst Wendy's on the planet. Truly, the least efficient
place I've ever stepped foot in. Everyone working there was unhappy.
Everyone moved at a glacial pace. Every single order (and it took me
forty minutes to get my food) was screwed up. Every single person ahead
of me came back to get it fixed, slowing everything down even more,
making the people working there even more grumpy. When I finally got my
food I discovered that salad as a bowl full of vegetables is not really
how it works. Who would want that? Instead, I got lettuce with meat as
a condiment. There was great annoyance with me when I asked if there
was a salad that didn't involve pig. The girl turned around and asked
if there was a salad that didn't involve pig.

One was finally found. The whole process, plus eating, took almost an hour and a half. So much for fast food.

Between
the traffic and the (ahem) fast food, I didn't even make it to
Kentucky. After passing miles and miles of billboards declaring that
various famous for West Virginia folks (Senator Byrd? WV
representatives? Football stars? Who knows....) are "Friends of Coal!,"
rolled into Huntington at 10:30 at night, not realizing that I was just
a few miles from the Kentucky border, ready for some rest before
heading out again in the morning.